Last week it emerged that TSMC may be losing some 28nm orders to other foundries, and now it appears that UMC is snatching its business.

The rumours suggested MediaTek and Qualcomm are looking for cheaper 28nm alternatives, namely from UMC, SMIC and GlobalFoundries.

Now it seems UMC is opening up the champers, but it's not alone.

Cheap chips for China

According to DigiTimes, UMC’s 28nm node has reached mature yield rates, and has attracted orders from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Since these are practically the two biggest smartphone SoC makers today, this is obviously great news for UMC – not so great for TSMC though.

Qualcomm and MediaTek are apparently trying to get the best bang for their foundry buck, as they are racing to the bottom in the Chinese smartphone market. The vast market is dominated by 28nm parts, mostly quad- and octa-core Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A53 parts.

Since smartphone ASPs in China are relatively low, every penny counts and cheaper chips get more design wins.

SMIC and HLMC are being tapped too

UMC is not the only foundry benefiting from Qualcomm’s and MediaTek’s newfound love of cheap silicon.

GlobalFoundries, HLMC and SMIC have also secured orders for 28nm basedband parts and low- to mid-range 28nm application processors.

Some smaller players are also moving away from TSMC. Nvidia is said to be taking its business to Samsung, at least as far as Tegra parts go. However, this is not something we can confirm at this point.

Starting last week, following a strong showing at the Mobile World Congress, MediaTek has a new brand name for its premium phone SoCs that is easier to remember than MT, followed by four digits.

MediaTek's current flagship SoC is branded MT6795, where MT stands for - you'll never guess - MediaTek. The competition is using similar number schemes, but also simpler brands like Snapdragon, which is easier to understand and remember. For example, the Snapdragon 810 is also known as MSM8994 and MSM according to Qualcomm´s Wikipedia webpage means Mobile Station Modem (MSM).

MediaTek is going to use Helio X branding for its high-end SoCs such as MT6795. This SoC will be known as Helio X10. The X comes from Extreme performance, something that we saw in the chip industry before. This is MediaTek's brand for the state of the art mobile computing technology and uncompromising performance and multimedia peformance, the company's top of the hill products. Helio comes from the ancient Greek Sun god Helios.

The runner up parts will be branded as Helio P series, where you can expect Premium performance optimised for battery life, PCB footprint and the form factor. This product like should enable high-end features in super slim designs aimed at the mainstream/performance market segment.

We got our first in-depth branding details from MediaTek's Vice President, Worldwide Public and Analyst Relations, Kristin Taylor, as well as some insights from Mohit Bhushan VP & GM, MediaTek Head of US Business Development. We had a chance to talk to Taylor and Bhushan last week at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.

The Xelio X10 is an 64-bit LTE octa-core 2.2GHz design, with eight A53 cores emploring patented CorePilot technology. The chip also includes some cool and differentiated multimedia features. We have been talking about the 120Hz display support that is a great feature when you see it live. This is the world's first chipset provider to endorse 120Hz technology into mobile. The chip supports MediaTek's MiraVision display picture quality technology, as well as the SmartScreen algorithms that you can check in the video below, explained by Russ Mestechkin, Director of corporate sales in Latin America. SmartScreen is an image enhancement technology that help render images better, using a custom pixel-per-pixel algorithm. The goal is to make phones with SmartScreen appear brighter under direct sunlight than the competition.

We can also remind you that Xelio X10, previously known as MT6795, has support for H.265 encode up to 4K2K 30fps, as well as Instant focus and Super Slow Motion technology. We hope to see Helio X10 in some important design wins such as the HTC One E9 codenamed A55 that we mentioned the other day, as well as the Meizu MX5, and hopefully some other flagship phones as well.

The company representative also added that MediaTek is making aggressive strides into North America and Europe as well as driving significant sales in India, South America and Russia, these are the companies key markets, well including whole Asia of course.

MediaTek is definitely Qualcomm's number one competitor in the smartphone space, and the company has just announced rather interesting product for tablets as well.

The MediaTek MT8173 is world's first Cortex A72 processor designed to target the tablet space. This is a quad-core with two new Cortex-A72 cores, backed by two frugal Cortex-A53 cores. The device is targeting mid- to high-performance tablets, and the chip will run at clocks of up to 2.4GHz. MediaTek has apparently been doing really well in the tablet market lately.

We had a discussion with MediaTek about this first A72 SoC for tablets (that we are aware of), and the company's representatives confirmed that this is a 28nm chip made at TSMC. We initially believed that the MT8173 is 20nm or even 16nm chip, but it looks like it is still early for these steps.

MediaTek is targeting the high performance tablet market with the quad core MT8173 and it promises six-fold performance increase compared to thr MT8125. The old, 32-bit MT8125 was released in Q1 2013 and it was a quad-core Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, backed by Power VR SGX544MP1 graphics at 256MHz. A newer version of the MediaTek quad-core tablet chip, the MT8135V powered by two Cortex A15 and two Cortex A7 and PowerVR 6200 graphics with two clusters and 450 GHz clock, ended up in the Kindle Fire HD 6 and HD 7. The MT8135V was the company's most successful tablet chip, at least when it comes to tablets designed for the western market.

The MT8173 can also have all cores running simultaneously for peak performance if needed, and the SoC comes with a Power VR 6250 GPU. This is a downsized graphics core, based on the same technology used in Apple's A8 processor that features a Power VR 6450 GPU.

The new Imagination PowerVR GX6250 GPU supports Open GL ES 3.1, OpenCL, delivers 350 million triangles per second and a fill rate of 2.8 gigapixels at its peak performance. It supports WQXGA 2560x1600 displays at 60fps and 120 Hz mobile displays at lower resolutions.

The graphics part of the SoC can support Ultra HD, also known as 4K, at 30 fps with H.264/HEVC(10-bit)/VP9 hardware video playback. HDMI and Miracast for multi-screen applications and 20 megapixel camera ISP with video face beautify and LOMO effects are on board as well. The SoC has security hardware acceleration supporting Widevine Level 1, Miracast with HDCP, and HDCP 2.2 for premium content on 4K TV displays.

MediaTek will demonstrate the chip at the Mobile World Congress starting tomorrow, March 2 2015, and customers have already received sample chips. You can expect to see the first design wins in retail sometime in the second half of the year. The MT8173 won't be the fastest chip around, but with two A72 and two A53 cores is might be a rather unique chip that might be after some mainstream tablet design wins with a good price/performance ratio.

AMD Hawaii came in late 2013 with a 512-bit memory interface, which was surprising, but the card did quite well against Nvidia's Kepler-based Geforce 780 TI in the high-end.

Nvidia’s Kepler was the previous generation 28nm architecture and it had a 384-bit memory interface. Kepler was competing well against Hawaii-based Radeon HD 290 series cards, but Nvidia really got in the game with the second generation Maxwell cards, with an even narrower 256-bit memory interface.

Maxwell is the codename behind Geforce GTX 980 / 970 cards and yet again Nvidia choose to use 256-bit memory interface. It is quite easy to jump to conclusions and say that a Geforce GTX 980 with 256-bit memory interface should have lower performance than a Hawaii card with 512-bit memory. The Geforce GTX 970 has 224+32-bit interface.

In a modern GPU, the memory optimization and compression algorithms are staring to kick into action showing that the real balance of shader unit numbers, Texture Memory Units (TMUs), Render Output Units (ROPs), RAM interface and architectural pipelines. It's the balance between different parts of a GPU that creates a wining product.

Bandwidth alone only helps when the pipeline needs more information to feed the shaders, but this doesn’t happen all the time.

What we want to state that the fact that AMD is coming to market with the first High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) memory, with a significant memory performance increase, but that doesn’t have to mean that Nvidia’s card with GDDR5 will be left in the dust. The Geforce GTX 980 wins in lot of benchmarks, with a narrow 256-bit memory interface against 512-bit Radeon R9 290X cards.

Nvidia has the quite interesting GM200 chip just around the corner, and that might give it some space to hold the ground against AMD before 16nm TSMC manufactured FinFET Pascal comes to market in 2016. Nvidia’s Pascal is its first HMB solution that is using stacked 3D DRAM memory, unified memory, NVlink and comes with a Pascal module to house Pascal GPUs with NVLink.

We are not saying that there is a winner or loser between Nvidia’s next generation GM200 card and AMD HBM Fiji, but have in mind that due to its low power consumption it would not be that hard to put two GM204 chips together and market a new GX2 dual-chip card. Late 2015 will bring a big and healthy fight in the graphics market and end-users will be the winners, as always - we will get more competition that will result in lower prices from companies.

Fanboys will be the only losers, as one architecture will perform better than the other.

In early January we heard a thing or two about an AMD card codenamed Fiji, the one that comes with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

The card is expected in the second part of 2015, and it will beat Nvidia Pascal to market. Nvidia is also using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for its 2016, 16nm GPU, but the company is using another technique, quite different compared to AMD's Fiji. Nvidia also announced Pascal Unified memory with 3D memory, an NVLink GPU in 2016 pointing to a Stacked DRAM powered Volta, the successor of Maxwell. Pascal is next year, as Nvidia needs to have a 16nm TSMC node operational and ready before it goes after this next big thing.

AMD is using what is calls a 2.5D-IC silicon interposer, which means that there will be two separate chips on the same silicon interposer and package substrate. Fiji in 28nm will be one of these chips, and the second batch of chips will be the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) memory designs. However, there is a catch with AMD's approach.

From what we've learned, Fiji is limited to 4GB memory. With the current memory technology the GPU would simply be too big to put on an interposer and package. The interposer should be viewed as a stack of conductors that lets the GPU and HBM memory communicate at much higher speeds than ever before. The interposer then gets into the package that goes on PCB. You could say the interposer is the middle-man that makes things faster.

Hynix has HBM memory with 1024-bit wide interface and 1Gb/s per pin data-rate. This results with 128GB/s bandwidth per memory chip. In case of four 8 Gb chips (1GB) with a 1000MHz core clock you can end up with total bandwidth of 512GB/s. There are indications that HBM memory on Fiji might work at 1.25GHz, which would result in 640 GB/s. The Geforce GTX 980 has 224GB/s bandwidth, while Geforce Titan Back has 336 GB/s.

SK Hynix has listed that 1GB, 128GB/s chips with 1.0Gbps speed packaged in 5mKGSD are available now, January of 2015. These HBM chips feature 4Hi stack VDD/VDDQ 1.2V. The old GDDR5 needs 1.5V to work, meaning that HBM is not only faster, it is more power efficient as well. Fiji could end up having more than twice the bandwidth or Nvidia's current and upcoming Titan cards.

Nvidia on the other hand is using what is called Vertical stacking 3D, or on-package stacked DRAM for its Pascal 2016 GPUs. Nvidia gives a straightforward explanation of the meaning of 3D memory on Pascal: "3D memory: Stacks DRAM chips into dense modules with wide interfaces, and brings them inside the same package as the GPU."

The clear benefits are a massive increase in bandwidth and quadruple energy efficiency. Nvidia is waiting for 16nm to make such a chip possible, and 3D memory is better approach than the interposer.

Back to the AMD Fiji approach with 2.5 stacking and interposer. Our sources claim that you cannot put more than four memory chips on the interposer, meaning that Fiji is limited to 4GB of memory. Eight chips next to a massive GPU would result in massively big chip (remember the GPU and memory chips are on the same board - interposer) and then put on the package. This is why we don’t think 8GB HBM Fiji will happen with this generation, but with time Hynix will come with more dense HBM memory chips making 8GB 2.5 D cards possible.

The only thing that comes to mind is that AMD could be using 4GB HBM memory on the interposer and then put some additional GDDR5 chips on the PCB. Think of it as L2 and L3 cache with some older CPUs. Level two cache would be really faster, while Level tree cache would be slower, but would be able to get some important things done.

We don’t think that this would happen as GDDR5 memory would be significantly slower than the HBM part, making the similar case than with Geforce GTX 970 memory. Fiji has a good chance to beat whatever Nvidia comes up with in 2015, but it will probably have a hard time fighting against Pascal. Pascal is coming in 2016 and one can only hope that it will happen in early 2016.

We believe Fiji and Pascal will enable single GPU 4K gaming at acceptable frame rates and prices.

We have reported that Kaveri gets a desktop refresh but apparently due to ambient noise at the noisy CES, we didn’t catch the right name.

The processor codename is Godavari, again a river in India. In case you didn’t know Kaveri is also a river in India.

The new desktop refresh according to SweClockers is going to end up with A10-8850K branding. The new processor will get a 100MHz faster turbo clock and is based on the same 28nm manufacturing process. The base CPU clock for the A10-8850K is 3.7GHz, the same speed as the AMD A10-7850K, but the Turbo clock will jump to 4.1GHz with the new one. The A10-7850K has 4.0 GHz top turbo clock and 720 MHz GPU speed for its GCN Sea Island GPU.

The new A10-8850K will get the GPU to 856MHz. The memory speed supported stays at 2133MHz and the socket of choice remains FM2+. The TDP stays at 95W.

As you can see this is a small evolution and you can expect some cool parts for AMD on the desktop side in the latter part of 2016, some eighteen months from now, in 14nm.

In order to put a bit more pressure on Intel's Core i3 Haswell lineup, AMD has now officially introduced the newest A10-7800 FM2+ socket APU which will be based on 28nm Kaveri architecture.

Featuring four Steamroller CPU cores, the A10-7800 does not feature an unlocked CPU base clock multiplier like the A10-7850K APU but does come with a slightly lower 65W TDP. It packs 4MB of L2 cache, works at 3.5GHz base and 3.9GHz TurboCore CPU clocks and features Radeon R7 series GPU with 512 GCN2 cores and 720MHz base clock.

The A10-7800 is a part of the second batch of AMD Kaveri APUs, which also includes the A4-7300 and the A6-7400K, which has recently showed up for pre-order. This lineup follows the A10-7850K, A10-7700K and the A8-7600 Kaveri APUs which were officially launched back in January this year.

The rest of the specs include integrated dual-channel memory controller with support for DDR3-2133 memory and PCI-Express 3.0 root complex.

While it still has to be listed in Europe, the A10-7800 should have a retail/e-tail price of around US $150.

XFX has announced its Radeon R9 295X2 Core Edition graphics card. XFX's Core Edition graphics cards are based on AMD's reference design and the new R9 295X2 is not an exception either as it features the same hybrid liquid+air cooler.

Based on two fully-enabled 28nm Hawaii XT GPUs, the R9 295X2 packs 2816 Stream Processors per GPU and 8GB of memory (4GB per GPU) paired up with dual 512-bit memory interface. The GPUs are clocked at 1018MHz while 8GB of memory ended at 5.0GHz.

All AMD AIB partners are sticking to reference design with liquid+air hybrid cooler which features a block/pump for each of the GPU connected to a 120mm radiator while the central fan takes care of the memory, VRM and the PLX bridge chip.

Based on reference design, it is expected that XFX will stick to AMD's suggested retail price of US $1,499.,

Although the new dual-GPU Hawaii-based AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card is scheduled to oficially launch on April 8th, the full press deck which includes all the key specifications, cooler details as well as general performance has been leaked online.

While it was already pretty much confirmed that the Radeon R9 295X2, codename Vesuvius, will feature two fully enabled 28nm Hawaii GPUs with 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a full 512-bit wide memory interface, we did not have any precise details regarding clocks of those GPUs, at least not until today. In case you missed it earlier, the two GPUs are interconnected via a PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express 3.0 x48 bridge chip and feature a total of 8GB of GDDR5 memory (4GB per GPU) and a hybrid liquid+air dual-slot cooler.

The GPUs on the Radeon R9 295X2 are clocked at up to 1018MHz, according to leaked slides, while 8GB of GDDR5 memory ended up clocked at 5.0GHz. The PCB below the cooler is apparently based on a 12-phase VRM design and needs two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. The specified TDP is set at 500W which means that AMD is pushing those two 8-pin PCI-Express above their 150W rating, which also means that these graphics cards will need a hefty and quality PSU with a powerful +12V rail in order to work properly.

The hybrid liquid+air cooler is co-developed by AMD and Asetek and features pump-blocks located on the GPUS and connected to a 120mm radiator. The center placed fan on the graphics card should keep the VRM, memory and PCIe bridge chip well cooled.

According to one of the slides, the Radeon R9 295X2 should be around 60 percent faster than the Radeon R9 290X in 3DMark Firestrike benchmark, which is in line with the expectations.

AMD has showed us its reference tablet based on the 28nm Mullins chip. It works at 1.2GHz and it is a quad-core part. AMD told us that they never had issues with 64-bit support on tablet chips. We saw it running Windows 64-bit and the overall performance was quite good.

The tablet in question had 2GB DDR3, Low Power 2014 APU i.e. Mullins, 60 GB mSATA SSD, 1920x1080 display and as mentioned Windows 8.1 64-bit. Quanta made the reference design tablet. It supports USB 3.0 as well as mini Display port all via Lighting Bolt. We could learn from AMD that the reference design is wrapped the 10-inch form factor and we don't expect smaller devices. The chip itself is at a tablet acceptable 4.5W TDP.

We don’t know the actual battery life since this is still a reference design tablet, but some retail tablets should be out by the middle of the year, AMD told us. MSI's W30 with an AMD A4 1200 processor is already out, and there's a Xolo tablet - these are the first vendors to launch a 28nm AMD APU in a tablet. This year should be better and there should be a few more designs based on these quad cores.

These tablets offer a decent amount performance and as long as the battery can last enough and they will compete well against Atom chips including freshly launched dual Atom Z3460, Z3480 Merrifield based dual cores and Atom Z3560 dual and Z3580 Moorefield quad core, all based on Airmont 22nm core.

AMD also showed its ULV mini PC and some gaming controllers but we will talk about this in another piece, since they aren't exactly new.